--- Piotr Gasiorowski <
gpiotr@...>
wrote:(some very welcome clarifications. Thank you .)
A few follow ups:
>
> [PG] Even ancient toponyms like
> river-names seem to be
> 100% IE there (pace Theo Vennemann)
*****GK: Hydronyms and toponyms are excellent
indicators all right. Do you include those assumed to
be IE but which cannot be linked to any known IE
language? Plus one more "awful" possibility: in
Ukraine there are areas where the hydronyms although
clearly Slavic in form today are in fact Slavicized.
Much of south Ukraine was populated for centuries by
people of Turkic speech and the residue of their
erstwhile presence is still there. This is so because
when Ukrainians colonized the area there were still
Turkis around and so the river names were taken over
from them to a large extent. But there is very little
that survives beneath the Turkic layer. About 5 or 6
"Thracian" hydronyms on the Right Bank (probably
"Scythian" rather than Thracian actually), some 4 or 5
"Germanic" ones attesting to the once massive presence
of the Goths. But Gothic remnants were absorbed by the
Slavs in the 5-7th cs. so that is no surprise.(And
there are Baltic and Iranic ones too but no need to go
into that in detail now). How confident are you that
the 100% IE character of the LBK area hydronyms does
not reflect a prehistoric "ethnic cleansing" posterior
to the emergence of LBK?*****
>
> GK: Once we have Neolithic cultures both in Central
> Europe and in the
> Pontic steppes, linguistic and cultural osmosis
> could be more
> independent of each other.
*****GK: If Trypilja was IE why would you think that
it could not have provided the "satem" impulse, and
prefer Globular Amphorae for the role? GA originated
much further West. (Just thinking out loud in the
context of your theory)*****
>
> [PG] I see the "eastern Globular Amphora people"
> (expanding into the
> forest and forest-steppe zone of eastern Europe ca.
> 3000 BC) as the
> ancestral Satem speakers, perhaps with SE Poland and
> Volhynia as the
> focal region of Proto-Getic/Albanian, with
> Proto-Thracian (and Proto-
> Armenian?) developing further south (Podolia?), and
> the Proto-
> Baltic/Slavic dialects more or less south of the
> Pripyat' and west of
> the Middle Dnieper.
*****GK: Working with the GA c. in Ukraine is tricky
since they left practically no evidence of their
settlements here (unlike Poland and Germany). Ukr.
archaeologists are working almost exclusively on the
basis of graves and grave goods. There are interesting
characteristics to note. GA occupied an area where
Late Trypilians previously lived. It is unclear if
they moved in peacefully or not. Some of the Volynia
graves show evidence of Trypilian burials rites so
these might be assimilated Tryp. groups. The
easternmost graves of GA are under strong Yamna
influence (ochre, corded ware, some kurgans). There is
no evidence at all (to my knowledge)that GA crossed
the Dnipro. There is evidence that in many areas of
western Ukraine their descendants contributed to later
cultures (e.g. the stone box burial rite of the
Dnister), but they seemed to have been stopped cold by
the Yamna peoples. The mystery here is how was the
local CW culture formed. GA is only one component of
this and not a decisive one, so that this suggests
another force at work. What that might be is yet to be
discovered.*****
The Indo-Iranian branch would
> have resulted from
> the integration of some IE-speakers into the
> "autochthonous" cultures
> and semi-nomadic economies of the steppe --
> presumably Yamnaya
> (possibly non-IE-speaking). I would connect that
> "cooperative"
> acculturation process with social transformations
> producing warlike
> and "heroic" tendencies, increasing social
> stratification and leading
> to the collapse of the ethnic and political
> stability of the Pontic
> region as the Proto-Indo-Iranians extended their
> dominance.
*****GK But the problem here is that this cannot be
detected in the archaeology at all. I mean the IE
infiltration into Yamna. Unlike, for instance, the
emergence of the proto-Slavic Zarubynets'ka culture
[230 BC-150 AD], whose many integrating components can
be traced (Pomorians [ethnicity unknown], Laten
-ized Yastorf and Pszeworsk [Germanics], Milohrad
[Balts] and the middle Dnipro Scythians). In the case
of Yamna there is nothing which can be postulated as
"infiltrating IE". That is why the dominant view
remains that Yamna was IE on its own. I believe the
view that it incorporated non IE elements as it spread
eastwards is gaining ground though.*****
>
>
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